iLRN2020 6th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network

Monica Salazar and Anna Russ are the founders and publishers of Berlin Art Link magazine and founders and producers of MONA, a creative consulting and production company based in Berlin. In over a decade of realizing art-focused exhibitions, events, and video productions, Salazar and Russ have worked with leading museums, galleries, artists, universities, biennials and art fairs, as well as corporate and private clients around the globe.

In 2010, Salazar and Russ created Berlin Art Link Online Magazine, which offers a multi-faceted view of the art world through the stories of some of the most compelling and influential creatives and exhibitions around the globe. With an ever-growing audience and correspondents located in cities throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Berlin Art Link has served as a popular resource for discovering the best of visual art, design, music and film from a contemporary art perspective.

Through MONA, Russ and Salazar have bridged the gap between the art world and the public sphere to produce culturally dynamic media content and event productions. Recent selected MONA projects included organising art programming, media and event production for clients at AURORA 2018 (Dallas), the British Pavilion (Venice Art Biennale), Design Miami/, Frieze London and the Dhaka Art Summit.


About the iLRN 2020 Artist/Curator "Studio" Visits Program

Traditionally artists share their work with curators and collectors by bringing them to the studio and showing them what they are working on. This has always been a challenge for the digital artist because often the best place to experience the work is not in person but through a digital interface. With the coronavirus pandemic this is still a challenge for digital artists but now it is also a challenge to every artist and every curator that is trying to either show what they are making or see what is being made by others. Thinking about the new interfaces through which we are now communicating, our idea was to leverage the video conference model and ask artists and curators to show what it looks like, from their digital point of view, when they are making their work or when they are scouring the web to discover emerging practices. By sharing their screens, and walking us through their work and process, we get a clearer sense of what our new normal looks like, but we also discover, in this age of isolation, a new form of intimacy in which we see as another sees, navigating their virtual habitat as they experience it.

Organized and curated by Justin Berry (Yale University) and Johannes DeYoung (Carnegie Mellon University)